A/N: Okay, I know I've been spamming your inboxes with updates, but I just love the chemistry between these two too much to not write :) Anyhow, enjoy this part of the conversation (I know, I know, I've extended everything to the max, but these two are just so fun!)
Thank you for reading and reviewing once again, my lovelies :)
"You done eating?" she asks me as I pop the last bit of root into my mouth.
"Uh huh," I nod, wiping the grease from my fingers with a fallen leaf.
She's busy by the fire, cutting the cooked rabbit into pieces and leaving them to cool on a large sheath of leaf. At her nod of the head, I kneel down beside the dying fire to put it out, packing handfuls of dirt over the faintly-glowing coals. We'll be leaving soon, and it wouldn't do to leave such a visible track.
"So what's it like?" she prompts a conversation as we both work, "In District Eleven, I mean."
"Well, there are lots of plants," I begin, stating the obvious because I don't know where to start, "The District's got two main plantations, one's for grains and the other for fruits. The jobs there pretty much get passed down in the family. My great-grandparents were given an area in the orchards years ago, and my whole family still works there now. What about you? Do you mine?"
"No," she shakes her head, "We only start mining when we hit eighteen. Guess I'll never have to now. Well, I never liked the claustrophobic mines anyway, so I guess that's one good thing about the Hunger Games."
"Really? Eighteen?" I ask her, ignoring the second pessimistic half of her answer, "I started work when I was five. In poorer families, kids begin fruit-picking even earlier than that."
"Yeah," she says, blushing slightly, "But I wish I could've started earlier, just for the sake of earning more money. The amount my mother makes from healing is nowhere near enough to feed all three of us."
"I don't think we'd cope if we're just living on my parents' income," I tell her, "We're barely coping as it is."
"Six kids, yeah?" she asks, earning herself a surprised look from me, "You said you have five siblings at the interview. I haven't forgotten yet."
"You remembered that?" I exclaim, incredulous, "You and Peeta fairly stole the show, and you remembered what I said about my family?"
"Of course," she replies, "Can't forget the 'angel in the arena', can I? And you were so cute too. Still are, even under all the bruises and cuts."
I laugh at that, blushing a little at her compliment. "Seems like you and Thresh were the only ones who thought so," I tell her, "Everyone else has their eyes on you, Miss Girl on Fire."
"Aww, shucks," she chuckles.
"Especially a certain someone, eh?" I tease her, pausing my packing momentarily to look up and wink at her, "So tell me, is it true?"
"Is what true?" she fakes ignorance, although from the look in her eye I know she knows full well what I meant.
"Is it true," I press, grinning at the growing patches of pink on her cheeks, "About you and him?"
"Well, depends on how you look at it," she replies vaguely, deftly wrapping the rabbit pieces with fresh leaves, conveniently breaking eye contact with me, "What about you? Any romance?"
"I'm only twelve," I remind her in a mock-serious tone, but the gossipy feel of our conversation makes me grin instead, "But if I'm a hundred percent honest, then there is this boy..."
"You're just like her, you know," Katniss remarks, laughing as I lean in conspiratorially, "Prim used to tell me about her little crushes all the time, and I used to tell her that she's too young to have love interests. But then she'd only laugh at me and said that 'just because you're all boring with Gale doesn't mean I have to be'."
She says that line with a flick of her braid and a feigned haughty look, clearly doing a very bad imitation of her little sister. It makes me doubled over from giggling.
"And then I'd pretend to be mad at her, huffing off into a corner and telling her that I don't give a hoot about the name of her latest lover-boy," she continues, standing up to act out her little imagined scene with her sister, "But after half an hour or so, she'd come up after me and beg me to listen. She's a funny thing, my little duck. But tell me about this boy?"
"Well, he's quite something," I say, my cheeks flushed, "But I'm not going to admit my crush on national television!"
"You brought up the topic," she teased me, nudging me with her elbow, "Come on then, Rue. Spill the beans. Everyone's on the edge of their seat waiting for you."
They're probably disappointed that we're sitting here and chatting, actually. It would've made much better television if we're at each others' throats, instead of egging the other on about love confessions.
"No, you said nothing about you and Peeta," I tell her, trying hard to hold back my laughter enough so that I can shake my head, "So I don't have to say anything either."
"Ah, stalemate, eh?" she smiles, putting two bundles of wrapped rabbit before me. She packs the other two into her pack.
"Stalemate," I agree, smiling just as stubbornly back, "Here, take some of my food in exchange for the rabbit. There're plenty of these plants around."
"No, you keep the rabbit along with the rest of your stuff," she insists, "I can manage."
"No, sharing is caring," I stand my ground, dividing my stash of edible plants into two neat piles and pushing one of them towards Katniss, "My parents have taught me that ever since I could remember, and I'm not about to be selfish now. Besides, we'll both do a lot better with a good stash of food."
"Oh, alright," she recedes, flashing me a grateful smile as she tucks her share of plants into her bag, "I've got a couple of crackers and another four strips of dried beef to throw into the mix then; two crackers and two strips each. They keep for longer, so save them as the emergency supply."
"Oh, and I have another handful of berries and a bunch of firna," I add, splitting my newfound supply up in half, "They'll be good for staying hydrated later, and the firna'll fix up your stings if they swell up again."
She takes a deep blue berry in between her fingers and rolls it around, looking uncertain. "You sure this is safe?"
"Oh yes," I tell her, recognising the berry as one of those I've painstakingly differentiated from the nightlock, "We have them back at home. I've been eating them for days, and I'm okay."
She pops the bruised berry into her mouth, the corners of her lips tugged up blissfully as she rolls it around on her tongue.
"Tastes like blackberry," she remarks, putting another berry in her mouth, "Well, since we're divvying up all our food, we may as well look over the rest of our things. Prim, do you mind passing me my bag?"
There it is again. Prim.
"Ah, the damn thing's stuck," she mutters angrily as she tries to yank back the zipper on her bright orange bag.
"We'll just divide my things up first then," I suggest, laying out the content of my pack on the ground, "I've got everything in odd numbers, so we'll have to figure it out somehow."
Katniss has successfully opened her bag, but she put it down beside the log to crawl over to me, her eyes looking over my meagre supply.
"You keep your water skin," Katniss says as she hands it back to me, "I've got one too, so we're both set. And keep your slingshot too. As well as that pair of socks. I've got enough clothes and a bow and ..."
The rest of her words fade away in my ears as my fingers touch something sharp at the bottom of my pack. At the bottom of my pack, poking out from a frayed hole in the broken bag I got from the Cornucopia, is a shard of stone. Its tip is still sharp, the blade chipped slightly from wear. I pick it up slowly, my palm enclosing the zigzagging vines that bind the stone blade to its handle. It's the knife Thresh gave me for self-defence on that very first day, just hours before Felix died.
"Did you make that?" Katniss asks me, leaning over to look into my bag.
"I know it's not much," I reply, my head still in a haze, "But I had to get away fast."
I did. At that moment in time I had to get away from Thresh and the field and any reminders of Felix's death. But I didn't take into account how I am the biggest reminder of Felix's death of all, and how I can hardly run away from myself.
"Well, you did just right," she tells me, mistaking the meaning of my words completely, "Only the smartest tributes know to run away from the Cornucopia instead of towards it. Alright, let's take a look at my stuff."
She spreads her supply out over the patch of dirt where my things have been, placing each thing down with the utmost care. She pulls out thing after thing after thing, and I'm about to believe that her bag is bottomless when she places the last item down with a flourish. Over the coil of rope and the sleeping bag lies a pair of glasses, the lens tinted strangely. Katniss Everdeen has indeed saved the best til last, because that pair of glasses is probably one of the most valuable things inside this arena.
"How did you get those?" I ask her after I recover from my initial shock.
Is it even real? I don't know. I reach out a finger to touch it, and only then, with the feeling of cool material beneath my hand, am I convinced that it is real. Katniss has a pair of night-vision glasses.
"In my pack," she replies nonchalantly, shrugging her shoulders, "They've been useless so far. They don't block out the sun and they make it harder to see."
"Those aren't for the sun!" I exclaim, surprised that she has no idea about her own treasure, "They're for darkness! Sometimes, when we harvest through the night, they'll pass out a few pairs to those of us highest in the trees, where the torchlight doesn't reach."
"No wonder everything looks blurry when I had them on in broad daylight," Katniss says to herself, slapping her hand against her forehead in annoyance at her cluelessness.
"No, they're useless in sunlight, but I think only us night-harvesters know about them," I say, "They're incredibly rare, and the Peacekeepers back home guard them like hawks. One time, this boy Martin tried to keep his pair. Shoved them in his pants and tried to make it through the compulsory body search. They killed him on the spot."
"They killed a boy for taking these?" she gasps, incredulous.
"Yes," I nod grimly, suddenly saddened by this reminder of the cruelty back home, "And everyone knew he meant no harm. Martin wasn't quite right in the head, and he still acted like a three-year-old even though he was older than me. He just wanted them to play with, that's all."
"Oh," Katniss says, struggling to find the right thing to say and resorting to changing the topic altogether, "So... So what do these do?"
"They let you see in complete darkness," I explain, unable to show her how they work in broad daylight, "Try them on tonight when the sun goes down."
"I've never seen anything like it before," she confesses, tucking the pair of glasses back in her bag, "At home we used matches to light up the dark, not these high-tech things. And I've been using matches my entire time here too."
"Oh, we use matches most of the time too," I tell her, "These are only for special occasions. I've been using flints for fires here, even though I've only lit one because I'm terrified of them seeing the smoke."
"Here, take half of my matches and this flint stone," she hands me the bundle of matches, taken from her own stash, "Just in case we get separated and you need to light up something. No, don't refuse and be all polite. Just take it. I'm taking your stuff, aren't I? It's all fair and square."
Unable to argue, I slip the precious matches into my pack, making sure they stay in the driest place possible. Katniss stands up and takes a large branch in hand, using the leaves to level out the extinguished fireplace before us. I strap my bag over my shoulder as she picks up hers, and we make our way towards the mossy bank of the stream, Katniss using the branch to erase our boot prints as we walk along. Being out in the open makes me a little uncomfortable, but Katniss makes sure we're hidden by the dappling sunlight through the streamside trees.
We eat dinner early, munching on the remaining pieces of groosling as we walk. There is no point stopping, and besides, Katniss wants to cover a reasonable distance before nightfall. As the light begins to disappear, we leave the streamside to venture in the forest again. It's starting to get colder, much like the previous nights, and the thoughts of sleeping half-frozen in a tree makes me shudder.
"Where do you sleep?" she asks me as we stop within a particularly dense grove of trees, "In the trees?"
"Uh huh," I nod.
"Just in your jacket?"
"Yes," I say simply, swinging my pack off my back and taking out the pair of socks Lavender gave me. My fingers are getting numb. "But I also have these for my hands. They're nice and warm."
She looks thoughtful for a while, before opening her mouth again. "You can share my sleeping bag if you want. We'll both easily fit."
"No, it's okay," I shake my head, "I'll survive with my sock-gloves."
"Geez, stop trying to be so polite all the time," she tells me, a little exasperated at my apprehension, "Think of it this way. I'm not actually doing you a favour at all, but our body heats combined together will make the night less cold. For both of us."
Well, if she puts it that way...
"Okay," I reply, trying and failing to stop my grin from surfacing. This girl has only spoken to me for half a day, and yet she has already figured out the ways I think and the ways to make me agree with her.
Truth to be told, I do think it'll be lovely not to sit frozen and lonely as night falls for once. Actually, I think it'll be brilliant.